With rumors of a renewed goblin attack, Seoni and Seelah decided to head towards Thistletop and investigate. They’d been told by reliable sources that the goblin Gogmurt would most likely be the source of any new troubles. Unfortunately, they were only able to narrow down his possible whereabouts to the goblin fortress, the nettlemaze, the woods, or the treacherous cave. Seoni thought the goblin fortress was the best place to begin their search, but Seelah thought that would be too obvious. She wanted to explore the treacherous cave. Instead of arguing about it, they decided to split up.

The goblin fortress was suspiciously quiet as Seoni entered. She noticed a sling on the floor, but was much more interested in the battered chest. She used her masterwork tools to open the chest and found a blast stone and a potion. She wasn’t sure how useful the stone would be, so she stored that in her pack for later. She decided to hold on to the potion for the time being.

She continued on, on alert for danger which appeared in the form of a plague zombie. Thankfully she had her force missile ready, but didn’t put enough power into the spell to defeat the zombie. Her amulet of life absorbed the damage her foe would have dealt, and she was pleased to discover the potion she’d found was able to banish the plague zombie.

She was storing her amulet and spell back in her pack to recharge, when a noise caught her attention. She turned to find Amy and the toad behind her.

In this game each player makes their “secret” move in turn which can make it harder to figure out who’s who. However, once everyone has made their move, you take an identity token from the middle of the table. You can either be truthful or take the “wrong” token. It can be risky taking a different token than your actual identity because that tells at least one other player that you’re lying.

The game says you only need 3 people to play, but I would recommend playing with a lot more people. We played with 4, and it felt like we couldn’t really bring out the intrigue. It basically became “you’re lying”, “no I’m not” with the other two players deciding who was more believable. So you could tell when it was time to vote who was going to die.

I think that with more people, you could have more accusations and discussions, and I hope we get to play with a larger group to get a better feel for the game.

In this deck building game, you get a Super Hero card. These cards are larger than the other cards and give you a special ability to use during the game. For example, Aquaman lets you put any cards with cost 5 or less you buy or gain during your turn on top of your deck. So Aquaman doesn’t suck.

During your turn, you use the Power indicated on your cards to buy other cards/defeat Super-Villains. In the beginning you don’t have a lot of Power because all you have are Punch cards (+1 Power), but as you build your deck, you become more powerful. Also cards you gain might have special text on them which can allow you to pull off some nice combos. It can be important to have cards with Defense capabilities because some of the attacks can be pretty rough.

This is a semi-co-op game. The goal is to defeat all the villains in the Super-Villain stack, so in that respect you’re working with your fellow players. During the game you can add villains to your deck, and some of these cards attack your fellow players. Also, at the end of the game, each card has a victory point value, and the player with the most victory points is the winner. So in that respect you’re also fighting against each other.

Superheroes are kind of a big deal in our house, so much so that we had to hide our 17 month old son’s too-small Superman costume in order to stop him from demanding we put in on him. And the amount of Spider-Man merchandise we have is ridiculous (thanks to a certain grandfather).

This means we like superhero games. Admittedly we have a leaning toward Marvel, but in general if it’s a superhero game, we’ll check it out. We won’t get into video games, but I will say we have a preference for the Lego Superhero games. As for tabletop games, not counting pre-existing games with a “new” superhero twist, like Spider-Man Chutes and Ladders, we have four different types of superhero games: deck building, card, dice, and board.

Space Cat had recently acquired Indigo, and since we knew we were going to be having a 4 player game day, we asked her to bring it over.

It’s a fairly simple game, a lot like Tsuro. You lay down tiles which lengthen various paths. Instead of moving your ship down the path, you move gemstones. The goal is to get as many gemstones as possible by getting them to your goal area. The tricky part is that in a 4 player game, you share your goals with other players. So if I manage to get a gem, that means I’ve also given one to an opponent.

In placing tiles, you can’t directly connect two goals, and if you create a path that makes two gems run into each other, those gems are out of the game.

“Is that a toad?” Seelah asked as she joined Seoni at a table at the local tavern.

“It is.”

“Why do you have a toad?”

Seoni glanced at Seelah. “What if I told you it’s a magic toad?”

Seelah paused before answering. “Then you should take it with you when we go looking for the wrathful sinspawn. The sheriff has reports of the creatures coming up from tunnels discovered at the village house, the catacombs, the glassworks, and the shrine to Lamashtu. I was thinking I’d head to the shrine.”

Seoni couldn’t say she was thrilled to be enlisted for this expedition without being asked but decided not to argue the point. “I’ll start at the village house.”

This is the third in a four part series on Terra Mystica. In today’s entry I’ll talk about playing Terra Mystica on Tabletopia.

Professor and I have played around with Tabletopia a few times. The first full game we played with it was Dinosaur Island. It took a little getting used to. Thankfully there’s a feature that lets you have hotkeys to zoom in on different parts of the game, which also helps with moving around a larger game space. Once you get the hang of the clicking and dragging, that’s no big deal, though I do think that lengthens game play a bit. There’s a little bit of an issue with pieces locking into place. I was trying to put three workers on a space, but apparently there wasn’t enough room to lock them all in, so one locked on the space and the other two went flying across the board! It was really funny, but I can see it getting frustrating.

We also played around a little with Terra Mystica, which I found easier to navigate. It could be because I’d already played another game with Tabletopia, and I’ve played Terra Mystica multiple times, but the biggest thing was that I didn’t feel like I needed to zoom in. I could move my pieces and get my resources and see everything at once. I really liked that.

We were able to play a full game of Terra Mystica with President Gamer and Shutter, who now live across the country from us. This was really exciting, since it had been almost a year since the last time we’d gamed with them. We sent them the info on Tabletopia and Terra Mystica and set up a gaming date.

This is the second in a four part series on Terra Mystica. In today’s entry I’ll talk about using the Terra Mystica App. It is available forr Android or iOS, but my review will be based on using Android.

Professor discovered the Terra Mystica app and played a game against an AI, then we played a local game together.

Right now the app only has easy AI opponents, but they’re working on adding medium and hard. The game also has tutorials, but since we’ve played the board game, we skipped those.